busybee fluffy rambles

I’ve reorganized my bedroom and as part of it I decided to finally address the ongoing issues with my audio setup in there. I have an old AirPort Express which I was using as an AirPlay receiver so that I could play music and podcasts and such on the (rather nice) hi-fi speakers, but it’s been super unreliable as of late, and even when it does remain connected, it generates random popping noises on the speakers — not great when I’m trying to sleep!

So anyway I was looking up various aftermarket AirPlay receivers, and most of them are pretty expensive, but then I realized that there’s probably a way of receiving AirPlay on a Raspberry Pi, and yes, there is, and then just as I was about to look for used Raspberry Pis to install this on, I remembered I already have a Raspberry Pi, in my bedroom, in the very same nightstand I would be putting a new one in: because I have SOMA’s older smart shades which use a rebadged Raspberry Pi as their Bluetooth-to-HomeKit bridge.

And the SOMA Connect image is just running Linux (specifically Rasbian 10) and some proprietary software.

My current hardware setup: M1 Max studio in the office, M1 mini in the recording studio.

The Mac studio is great for editing video and doing compute-heavy tasks, and also has amazing peripheral connectivity which mostly goes unused. Connected to it I have an external NVMe enclosure, a second monitor, and a USB hub full of other stuff. Also a spare audio interface that it basically just uses as an unnecessary, overpriced DAC for my speakers and headphoens (and which I keep meaning to move to my gaming PC to get better audio for my VR concerts).

The mini in the studio is always short on connectivity options; it only has the two Thunderbolt ports, and could really use a third. It also has sufficient CPU for my music, but it’s a bit lacking in I/O, both because its internal 512GB SSD is slower than what’s in the Mac Studio, but also because it’s small enough that I have to offload most of my instrument sample data to a much slower external drive.

So what I need in the studio is more connectivity and more disk I/O, and what I need in the office is more compute…

My Bigscreen Beyond arrived today, right before I had to leave for choir practice. So of course as soon as I got home I set it up and tried it out. This is a quick first-impressions review.

So the new keyboard arrived today and I swapped it into my setup, along with the Akai MPK49 (which I also finally restored to working condition). Here’s some vague unstructured thoughts about it.

My impressions on the hardware, for what it’s worth:

• Really cool tech
• Kind of a solution in search of a problem
• I look forward to seeing what people do with it
• I look forward to it becoming affordable and usable for a lot more than just running fancy versions of iOS apps
• I will be way more interested if they let you apply filters to the external screen; why show a video feed of your boring human eyes when you can be your fursona or a protogen?

Yesterday my other big hardware upgrade arrived, a Focusrite 18i20 for my Mac mini in the studio, to upgrade the 18i8 I had before (which is now on the Mac Studio in the office).

The tl;dr: for most people the 18i8 is just fine and the 18i20 doesn’t really add anything. Consider the 18i20 only if you have a couple of fussy needs.

I got my Mac Studio yesterday, to replace the Mac mini in my office (the mini now replacing the 13" MacBook Pro in my recording studio, the MacBook Pro replacing the frustrating Lenovo laptop in the living room), and I have all my stuff set up on it. I went with the 10-core M1 Max model (with the upgraded GPU) and 2TB of RAM, sticking to the stock 32GB of RAM.

The keyboardio Model 01 was an amazing keyboard, with a couple of unfortunate flaws. The Model 100 is a billion times better.

Because of the cryptocurrency market crash, GPUs have really come down in price. They probably have a further ways to go but I decided that I’d waited long enough to finally upgrade my GTX 1050Ti, and picked up a supposedly-barely-used refurbished eVGA RTX 2080Ti Black Edition off eBay. The seller claimed it was bought from eVGA’s refurb department and used for only two weeks in a gaming rig. I’m not sure sure I believe that, but I figured it was a worthwhile risk to take. The total cost was $550 after tax and shipping, which happened to be almost exactly what I’d earned by participating in the itch.io queer games bundle, so that worked out nicely.